A lion, you say? A man-eater inside the village?
The story sounded bizarre. Only in this part of Africa would I listen even this far into the story as it was blurted out in breathless fragments, broken up in imperfect translation. Surely, something must have been added, or deleted, in the retelling through the third language layer! But, wait, this is Africa, and hoofbeats--at least in this part of the Dark Continent--more often foretell zebras than horses. This story reported facts that seemed too bizarre to be invented, so, let's listen further and try to confirm or refute the details that are coming together from various sources.
From earliest Greek historians to the present, story tellers and listeners expect something different in Africa than that to which our Western standards--criticizing the incredulous--would apply, since was it not Herodotus who said, "Ex Africa siempre veni aliquod novi?" So, hear me out!
But, a lion? Right in the middle of Ndamana village? Dragging him right out of his hut at night? Well, this story would reward looking into, and would turn out to be even more African than the black-maned male man-eating lion that captured the pastor, quite physically, and my vivid attention, quite literally, from the opening. Then, the story impressed itself much more morbidly on the center of life in Ndamana than the lion had, in a village important to my interests in being here in Central Africa.
Ndamana is hardly more than a wide spot in the trail leading through northeast Zaïre to the river border with the Central African Republic (Figure 1.). It is in a region of this impoverished corner of the savannah abutting the Ituri Forest that some of the world's highest rates of endemic goiter and cretinism might be found. Ndamana was a centerpiece of a study of this metabolic disorder, and the eleven percent cretinism rate and nearly one hundred percent goiter rate among the adults who survived childhood and developed even minimally beyond the cretinoid failure of mental and physical growth retardation. The biological data collected in our survey showed extremely well the low values for thyroid hormone and astonishingly high levels of thyroid stimulating hormone--a combination reflecting the world's epicenter of endemic hypothyroidism.
This study of endemic hypothyroidism is not only the reason for my presence in this village but also linked indirectly to the pervasive animism of the Azande culture, the anthropologic grouping of this tribal unit victimized by this disease. Causation of illness may be somewhat mechanistic and simplistic for western investigators--in this case clearly iodine deficiency plays a major role, with goiterogenesis also contributed to by a diet high in the staple cassava that is the staple starch of dietary intake, and some further implicated co-factor in selenium deficiency--the hypothesis still to be completely explored. These unfortunate people live with chronic micronutrient deficiency and marginal macronutrient adequacy, a setting in which hypothyroidism is both cause and effect, even possibly adaptive to this resource-poor environment. Ndamana, therefore, is a ripe field for study of the biologic and cultural effects of the disease hypothyroidism and vice versa. But, there may be more to be learned here at even more abstract levels in the adaptation of these people and their subsistence in this environment.
The facts ascertained about this startling story in Ndamana relate to the pastor and his wife. They lived in a dominant hut in the center of Ndamana village and were prominent citizens in this small community with the added cachet of his clerical role. There was some unsettling in this role when an assistant pastor was assigned from outside the village to Ndamana, largely to assist in setting up the clinic for the evaluation of the hypothyroidism project and an intervention program to enable prevention in this endemic process. The week before our arrival, there had been some direct confrontation over roles and limits of authority, and we later heard of an open challenge during the course of one of the Sunday worship services--details of which I was unaware when I first heard the lion story.
There is not much "evening" in this equatorial location, and after the single meal of the day at dusk, the fires sputter out and it is time to retire into the shelter of the thatched hut. This the pastor and his wife did, and soon were fast asleep lying quite close together on a woven cane wicket-work bed under the thatched roof and distant from the waning cooking fire.
It was some time at night when the wife woke up abruptly. She screamed with pain. Something had seized her foot, and she would not have awakened for the inconvenience of insect stings, nor even rat or snake bite. There it was again! This time her screams woke up her husband who sat bolt upright and seemed to understand in an instant what was happening before he uttered one exclamation and was no more. "Praise God!!", he murmured and his skull was crushed in the darkness quite audibly next to the ears of his terrified wife. An enormous powerful form was standing on her leg and reeking of rotten flesh now with the added smells of hot sticky blood mingling from husband and wife.
The big male lion had crushed the life out of the pastor by closing powerful jaws over his head and snapping shut. The big cat jerked up with hind claws imbedded in the pastor's wife's leg as he shook the pastor's lifeless body and began to drag it from the hut.
The villagers aroused by the wife's screams and the commotion peered out of their huts to see in the moonlight a dark shadow dragging a body by the head, carelessly stepping on the dangling limbs and jerking forward until it left the clearing and disappeared into the bush. There was a noisy sound of thrashing and dragging as the lion retreated further from Ndamana and then the deep hollow bass roar and even more frightening sounds of dismemberment and bone crunching by the feeding lion. The wife continued to scream and ululate and her neighbors kept up the high pitched keening wail of mourning without any impact on the satisfied sounds of the primary performance in the bush.
Some men had emerged from their huts and were stirring up the dying fire from the embers to make fire brands and torches, not to follow the lion's trail, but to attempt to ward off his return. No one slept in Ndamana for the rest of the evening, each cowering in his or her own thoughts as some of the women attempted to attend to the pastor's wife, binding up her stump that was squirting from where the lion had bitten off her foot. The pastor's wife seemed less aware of the pain at that time than her bigger loss that was still ongoing and sickeningly audible not far from the hut. She was taken out of the hut and brought to a neighboring hut where she became much weaker and was whimpering when dawn arrived and she was carried over to the minimal clinic.
At dawn the men of the village gathered in a group outside the hut, some looking in, but none entering. By now they had the torches burning in earnest, and very gingerly they advanced down the spoor of the very wide and bloody drag line into the bush with four wide-eyed men in the lead. In the second echelon, yet equally fearful, was the pastor's assistant. They had only gone three hundred meters when they found the pastor's half-eaten corpse without evidence of the lion's presence at that moment. They quickly pulled on the remains to retrieve them from the bush and hurried back to the village where renewed outcries and keening wailing was heard from all but the widow who was spared the sight of what was left of her husband having been taken off to clinic for an emergency operation by the Assa-trained nurse. She was then transferred over to CAR where the expatriate nurse cared for her, debriding the wound and suturing bleeders.
With as much formality as could be mustered by the assistant pastor, a grave was dug right by the roadside, one hundred meters opposite the hut in which he had lain down to sleep for the last time. As seen in Figure 2, the pastor's grave was fresh when I came upon it, with the half of his body that was recovered interred with as much haste as the formalities of the event could afford.
The lion returned. The assistant pastor had sent a runner to the district officer and the men of the village had gathered in a defensive committee, soon reinforced by the delegation from the district officer. That night, the lion returned, as they lay prepared for him at the sight where the pastor's remains had been abandoned. The big male lion was riddled with spears. Snarling and roaring he retreated back into the brush where soon he was heard gurgling and gasping as the final brave villager approached to touch his eye with a spear until it no longer blinked.
With as much triumphant relief as the still numbing shock of the pastor's loss would allow, they dragged the lion with all of their efforts a short way back to the village whereby the women could file out to see the dead beast and curse and spit upon it. Some of the young men who were not present at the kill still contributed by perforating the dead body until there was little of the hide to be saved. He was a very large black-maned male lion, with very worn down incisors, but no other evidence of crippling that may have occurred before he turned man-eater. There had been previous reports of missing sengi dogs in the area, but no other instance of attacks on people, and none has occurred since.
The name of a widow in Pazande is "poor person". The properties of her husband (NB: and her--as women are not considered worthwhile enough to own anything; typist's note) are divided among his male siblings, and she is not included in his estate. The typical outcome for a widow the age of the pastor's wife is a very short and unhappy life span, but even more so that she is crippled, as she had been in the same incident that took the life of her husband. In Figure 3 the widow is seen as she is learning to hobble with the aid of a stick on the remaining heel stump of what had been her foot. Her further status is unknown, and only a few of the women of the village knew about her for any but a few weeks after the event. She had received medical care, and the post-injury infection had been drained secondarily, but suffering depression from both the loss of her husband and her social status, she had very little will to live by last reports.
Probably the principle asset in the pastor's estate was the hut that he had built with the help of his kinship and which was a well-constructed, ventilated, centrally located thatched dwelling in the center of Ndamana. Until the time of our visit, no one had entered it. It was clearly a hut that had brought misfortune upon those who lived within it, and this ill luck lingered around it to make it in current real estate parlance "unsalable". There had been talk of burning it. Still other suggestions were to perform some ritualistic purification rite, which was under consideration by the assistant pastor, who was otherwise quite busy with higher priority issues. It was suggested that the curse could be lifted if some stronger magic would carry the evil from it that had been visited upon its inhabitants. The author (Figure 4.) without much hesitation, and probably mainly based in ignorance of the intense circumstances that were yet to be told in the village dynamics revolving around this fatal hut, went in to explore it and even lay down in the wicker- work bed and imagine the horror of that night for at least the surviving victim. The lion would have to be a very brazen beast and extraordinarily hungry to pass the smoldering fires and enter the center of the village and its dominant hut; but even if extraordinary, these circumstances appear to be substantiated in fact with unfortunate circumstances that resulted for all, grave injury to one, and death to the principle person in the village.
After the author's perhaps foolish foray into the hut, others followed, and the assistant pastor announced that it would not need to be burned, but further disposition would be brought up for later consideration after much higher priority issues had been resolved. I took this as a positive development, and knew nothing of the reference he was making.
We went about our medical business and lined up all the children of what would have been called school-age, and a similar queue of men and women to assess goiter size, reflexes, weight, blood pressure, pulse, and blood sampling for thyroid functions to measure the effects of intervention of depot-iodine supplementation. Ndamana remains a remarkable village for the data obtained in the thyroid study. Perhaps more remarkable still is the discovery through rumor of some of the goiter study participants of a much more involved dynamic in the evidently self-fulfilled prophesies they had witnessed firsthand.
It was gradually confirmed and details filled in that the row that had broken out before our visit in the eventful weekend preceding the clinic establishment was occasioned by one person's diagnosis as to the cause of his child's disease. The disease itself was not a diagnostic dilemma--it was cretinism, plain and simple. But the "how?" was not as powerful as the "why?" had been to one credible judge of the event.
During the course of a worship service in the week preceding the fateful night, the pastor had let fly at the assistant pastor a threat to keep him in his place and to delineate his prior authority and the limits of infringement. Rather than responding directly to this challenge, the assistant pastor began an impassioned litany bewailing his own misfortune. After a prolonged period of infertility and stillbirths, his wife had conceived and carried a child to live birth which was a source of great joy upon his arrival in Ndamana. However, it was becoming increasingly apparent, that the child was a full-blown cretin, developmentally retarded in mental, social and physical milestones and would not be a contributing member of the family that his Father had so desperately longed for. He had loudly opined that he knew who had visited this curse upon him and that a sure sign from God would befall the perpetrator of this evil who had robbed him of his right to a child in a true sense.
No one needed any more proof than the bizarre thunderbolt that hit the dominant hut in the center of Ndamana village when a shaggy black-maned lion entered with a frightening roar. All the Azande animus and confidence in cause, effect and retribution were underscored beyond contradiction, and whatever the goiter team was doing to try to illuminate some minimal scientific inquiry into this major problem was minimally interesting and massively irrelevant. They already knew "what?" too well; but, more dramatic proof of "why?" could not be gainsaid.
We came, we saw, we went away with numbers. We believed, within specified confidence limits, in one independent variable's effect within the limits of our observation that was data-based . They were overwhelmingly convinced by a signal event so obvious and self-evident that no explanation was needed and no refutation was expected. We have some preliminary evidence and suggestions as to "how?" hypothyroidism has become endemic in the Ndamana region; the Ndamana community is fervidly convinced as to "why?" it severely affected one of its members. For what more proof could you ask?
Both sides learned from our study in Ndamana; Africa, one--molecular biology--nothing.
Figure 1. The areas of Africa (A) in Northeast Zaire, Central Africa (B) is the location of Ndamana (C) site of both culture's inquest into the causation of hypothyroidism.
Figure 2. The pastor's fresh grave as I had come upon it within the week of the fatal event, to which half of his remains were retrieved and interred.
Figure 3. The pastor's widow (translated in Pazande, "Poor Person") now bereft of her husband, social status and one foot, crippled by the lion's attack.
Figure 4. The author enters the fatal hut, the first person to do so since the fatal encounter with the lion took place within it, lifting the curse of misfortune from it to be carried away on foreign shoulders.